Tuesday, January 27, 2009

I've got my own close relationship with my Mpc 3000 and I've always viewed her as her own instrument. Finally I'm starting to see some people make this a reality. This is Anchorsong from Japan doing some live mpc programming and sequencing with a string quartet. Halfway in is pretty sick.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

So first off I wanna mention the 2 buses that got stopped at the border. They were detained for 7 hrs. Yeah 7 hrs. Respect goes to Tyrone, Gavinand everyone else on the other buses that had to endure that. You might have seen it on the news. I was very fortunate to be on the only bus of the 3 that got through without incident.

We arrived in Washington maybe around 10am in an area along with maybe 100 other buses carrying people from everywhere you could think of. Shuttle buseswere there to take everyone into the downtown core. If you haven't been to Washington before, the government area is striking. I have been therea few times but seeing it filled with that many people made me really feel the weight of the moment. America always had a great sense of theater.

We had to walk about a kilometer down blocked off streets to get to the field. Guards dressed in army fatigues were directing the traffic.There was a great feeling in the air and people were at times cheering in the streets as we were walking. At times when we were on a hill we couldcatch a small glimpse of the hundreds of people walking in front and behind us. On the street side people were selling obama merchandise everywhere and of every kind. I mean, Obama condoms I heard were being sold. Really?

We ended up near the Washington monument. We came to this point where there was a hill and as we got to the top and looked over, all youcould see was people everywhere and American flags. It was crazy.

There were so many people it was hard to get to the areas where youcould see the tv screens. People were climbing trees and sitting in branches that looked like they could break at any moment.

One guy got an idea and climbed the outdoor portapotties so he could see better. This idea snowballed and soon more people were doing the same thingincluding me and my peoples.

This is me taking a picture of whats behind us. I'm on top of the porta bathrooms now. I couldn't turn around because below to my right are security guards yelling at us to get off. Whenever I turned around they would try to catch my eye and start threatening me with jail so I had to just take a pic without actuallylooking through the camera. There were about 30 of us spread out across 10 of these porta washrooms trying to see the screens.

People and the security guards behind us started shaking the things trying to make us fall off. The tension in the crowd started building becauseapparently we were blocking others from seeing. The people on the other side were freaking out because if those porta potties fell they would've fallen on them.Not to mention, the poor people who were inside them trying to take a piss.

I eventually had to get down because my porta washroom was being pushed from the other side and there was a security guardthat kept trying to grab my leg and pull me off. Eventually everyone did too except one guy who the police came and almost took out of the crowd. Even the police though didn't seem up for it. The mood was too good.

On the ground We were very very far from where the stage was but I remember that when Bush and Cheney came out you could hear booing from all over the city. I don't know how those 2 managed to stay on stage the whole time with so much hate and anger being hovered at them.

So in our area because of the whole portapottie incident people were pushing and yelling...a little irritated... all that stopped when Obama started to speak. I swear the whole 2.9 million people went silent. All you could hear was the occasional walkie talkie from a security guard or something.

I was wedged in between a father and his 2 kids and two taller guys who looked like they were in their late twenties. None of us knew each otherbut we all smiled at one another because we felt the same pride being there. It was a moment I'll take with me for a long time.

Saturday, January 17, 2009

Thursday, January 15, 2009

I'm a pretty big fan of the French line APC ... I wasn't insane over their winter 08 stuff, but the spring preview to me is looking really dope. Again falls into my clean, grown but still a bit street preference in garments,, and I gotta give them extra credit cause I find a lot of brand's summer lines are boring to me, almost as if they're just filling the time till they drop the hot fall shit. I feel like APC is definitely coming with some cool ideas for summer looks this year. The line can be pricey but is probably one of the more reasonably priced designer brands in it's pocket. Relatively easy to find. To my Toronto peeps, head to Nomad and holla at Zeb. New York, take your pick,, cause it's all over the place and they have a shop there as well.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

We as a collective doing some left of center stuff, love to see other collectives also pushing the envelope and killing it. My man Joey put me on to FREE THE ROBOTS and I've been hooked ever since. These guys are a live production duo out of Cali. They've been put into many different categories but these guys pretty much defy genres. They'll be at Webster Hall in New York alongside Joi (Outkast, Dungeon Family) January 24th. I will definitey be checking out this show if I'm in town. Peep their myspace for more info: MYSPACE

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Heres a dope dope art piece of us done by our man Bjoern Arthurs for the Longest Night mp3. Its included in the download for your ipods but I had to post it as its own stand alone work. Its wicked. Check out Bjoerns other visual work he's done HERE. Shout outs to our boy Bryan Brock for his art direction as well.

Now you can start to take our live remixes into your ipods, cars, whatever floats your boat. Here's our first installment. Live off the floor, one take. Well maybe it was the second or third take but who's really counting?

Its been a long time coming but Montreal we're finally hitting you up. Maybe this time I'll finally get my french accent right. We'll be at the Academy Club. Haven't been there before so i don't know what to expect in terms of the venue, but expect the music vibe to be sickkkkkk.

Thursday, January 1, 2009

So we opened for Questlove on Monday the 29th of December at the legendary SOBS in New York. We started the trip with what's kinda becoming our New York tradition now. We all take seperate flights arriving in the city one by one, at different times, usually due to poor planning, and when we finally arrive we hook up, eat and then go back to my apartment to do some work before we crash.

My apartment is a typical small New York apartment, so we are all sleeping in one room on couches and air mattresses like the 3 stooges. It's quite the scene. Anyways, we then awoke at 11:30am for our traditional day of the show (jesus we better sound tight) rehearsal.

After rehearsal it's right to sound check. You should see us packing equipment into cabs. Also quite the scene. We can't fit all of our gear into a regular cab so we have to wait for those van cabs. We usually have one guy watch the equipment and then two guys strategically stand on different corners trying to flag down cabs and coax them over to us. Even though they're vans, and can totally fit our gear, a lot of the drivers are apprehensive about taking us with all of our stuff. This usually requires us to sort of ambush them by leading them over to the equipment and before they know what's happening, they have a rocket launcher sized Keyboard case rammed in their trunk along with three low lives packed into their back seat. It's kinda like an effective bank heist.

Anyways,, the show, the show. As artists, it's sort of natural to really want the respect of your peers, maybe even more so then the respect of your fans. Maybe not? Well I think we can all agree that we want the respect of the icons in the game. Questlove is obviously nothing short of an icon. Maybe more specific of an icon to what we do then anyone else, since we're a weird kinda remix band and The Roots were the first and still are the most relevant hip hop band. So of course leading up to this gig the babbling amongst us was "maybe Questlove will see our stuff,, I really hope he likes it,, he has to like it's dope,,, but what if he doesn't.." Anyways, the crowd ate it up, and afterwards when he came up to set up his laptop he told me that was "pretty incredible, and said that it didn't look easy keeping all the samples synced up live the way we do." I was like "wow dude you just made my our entire year" lol.

Big up the staff at SOBS for treating us so nicely. You could definitely feel the history in the room,, well not literally,, but kinda. The posters downstairs helped. Big up to everyone that night that came out to the show and got sweaty to us and and Questlove.